Abstract:
Do you know what your readers really want from the documentation you send them? You might think you are giving them high-quality documentation, but do your readers agree with you? Have you asked them?
This talk presents data from an applied research study that proposes a preliminary, focused, clearly defined, and reader-oriented model for collecting meaningful and actionable feedback to improve documentation quality and increase reader satisfaction.
Details:
In this interactive talk, we will:
- Learn about a narrow yet comprehensive set of well-known and empirically tested information quality dimensions that cover all categories of quality – Intrinsic, Representational, Contextual, and Accessibility
- Find out how readers rate these dimensions as they relate to documentation quality
- Create, based on this, a measurable, unambiguous, and reader-oriented definition of documentation quality
- Get some clear,
research-based takeaways that we can use to:
- Collect meaningful and actionable feedback
- Provide reliable methods and metrics for measuring documentation quality
- Create a common documentation quality terminology
- Help writers understand what is important to readers
Bio:
Yoel Strimling has been an editor for over 20 years, and currently works as the Senior Technical Editor/Documentation Quality SME for CEVA Inc. in Herzelia Pituach, Israel. Over the course of his career, he has successfully improved the content, writing style, and look and feel of his employers’ most important and most used customer-facing documentation by researching and applying the principles of documentation quality and survey design. Yoel is a member of tekom Israel, a Senior Member of STC, and the editor of Corrigo, the official publication of the STC Technical Editing SIG. He can be contacted at yoel.strimling@ceva-dsp.com.